Advertising’s innovators: Awards honour brands that use technology in new ways

Marketing’s 2012 Media Innovation Awards: Nissan takes top prize

Brands that demonstrated an ability to steer advertising technology into uncharted territory were sought out by judges in awarding top honours to Nissan Canada at Marketing’s 2012 Media Innovation Awards.

Nissan’s “Innovation that Excites — Altima Launch” campaign, highlighted in a giant live-action holographic projection, light and water show on Canada Day this year, took home the Best of Show award, picked from a list of 20 gold prize winners at the Toronto event last week.

The campaign from media buying agency OMD and advertising agency TBWA of Toronto was cited for marketing executions in a variety of media for “Innovation that Excites – Altima Launch,” including print, digital, social and experiential platforms.

“It was clear to me and it was clear to everyone else that [Nissan] relentlessly pursued innovation in every channel,” said Cathy Collier, co-chair of the Media Innovation Awards and the chief executive of OMD Canada.

“The judges really appreciated the creative approach to traditional media and truly innovative use of digital, social and experiential media.”

In addition to the light and water show, which used 3-D projection technology at July 1 events in Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto and Vancouver, Nissan was awarded gold in the “Experiential/Special Events/Stunts” category, gold in the “Cars and Automotive Services” category and silver award for the “Best in Newspaper,” category. The winning campaign included a print promotion in Postmedia and the National Post that used Layar technology to allow readers to scan a photo of the 2013 Altima car using their mobile devices to access additional content.

“We are so honoured to have our innovative work recognized by one of the most prestigious and important media industry awards programs in Canada,” said Judy Wheeler, Director of Marketing at Nissan Canada Inc. “There has never been a more exciting time at Nissan and we are thrilled to continue to share this excitement and connect with customers through ground-breaking, multi-platform marketing initiatives.”

The Layar technology used for newspaper ads allows mobile phones to act as “a bridge between print and the digital online space,” said Marcus Strong, director of 3i at Postmedia Integrated Advertising. “These things that push out interactivity add a whole other layer of data to the newspaper conversation. The idea to use augmented reality like Layar to take what is essentially a flat piece of information, albeit very pretty, and add new layers of data and interactivity — from our perspective, as much as there is opportunity in the advertising and marketing space for this, we also see an opportunity from an editorial perspective.”

The Layar technology, Ms. Collier added, “was not only part of the Nissan advertising, but it was also being introduced for the first time to consumers,” she said.

“It was completely new to Canada, which added that extra degree of difficulty because you are not only launching a technology, you are also having to educate consumers on the technology before it would work on the campaign. It added a degree of difficulty for sure.”

The popular campaign from Johnson & Johnson and Lowe Roche netted gold in the consumer engagement category. It used a dynamic interactive audio feature when users logged on to a website set up to apologize to loyal users about store out-of-stocks for a popular line of tampons. At the website, users were asked to type in their names and a man singing a ballad would sing it back to them in the lyrics of his apology.

The website from McDonald’s Canada and OMD received a lot of attention when it launched in the summer with a no-holds-barred approach to consumer questions, aimed at dispelling widely circulated consumer myths. (Among them, a popular piece of urban lore in Quebec was that McDonald’s food secretly contained an anti-emetic medicine to prevent people from vomiting after they ate it).

Zellers and John St. won a gold in social media for the quirky digital campaign that embraced the fact that Zellers would close most of its outlets this fall to make way for the arrival of U.S. mass merchant Target in the spring. The series of commercials was the first in several iterations of the retailer’s final marketing push and starred a fictional “executive managing director” of Zellers who sits behind his desk in his underwear and leaves the office early to go out and party with his co-workers. The campaign involved a Facebook contest allowing customers to vote on the sale prices of merchandise, pick the music playlist inside Zellers stores and record their own Zellers radio ads.

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